An Alternative to “Finding Your Purpose”

My purpose is to tell you to stop searching so hard for yours 😐

Jessie Lewis
9 min readDec 7, 2022

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Photo by Anika Huizinga on Unsplash

If another article even mentions that it’ll help me find my “life purpose,” I might throw up.

And then I’ll go read it three times. Because of course I will.

I spend way too much time thinking about purpose, meaning, and how I should endeavor to spend my short time on this planet. (Probably more time thinking than doing, if I’m honest.)

But through all the journaling, reading, podcast-devouring, and navel-gazing, I feel like I’ve hit on something that feels true. It’s a principle I began to follow years ago in small ways without fully understanding it. But now, I want to follow it every moment of every day for the rest of my life.

And it’s this: Stop worrying about some overarching life purpose. Instead, focus on alignment.

How a swing dancing convention changed my life

It was 2014. I was finally walking to my car after another long day at my first big-girl job.

A college buddy and I were catching up over text when she dropped the bomb. “Oh, and I’m going to this big swing dancing convention! Excited about that.”

I stopped right there in the parking lot.

A swing dancing convention? And she hadn’t told me??

We were both avid dancers at the time. But a whole convention dedicated to dancers-I hadn’t even known something like that existed. My heart was pounding. It was the single greatest event I could imagine.

A dance from my college days in my TWIRLY TWIRLY dress

A quick Google search on my tiny smart phone revealed that the event was only a month away. And that meant all tickets were at their highest price.

Despair! Even if I splurged, I’d have to somehow pay for both a hotel room and gas for the six-hour trip. I was a new grad with my requisite mountain of student loans. Big expenses were out of the question.

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Jessie Lewis

Writer, artist, mom. Subscribe to my personal newsletter, The Jumble, for more on creative living → https://jessielewis.substack.com/